SAPPORO, Japan – More than 2 million visitors are expected at this year’s Sapporo snow festival, which kicked off on Monday, showcasing hundreds of ice sculptures of iconic movie characters, celebrities and even US President Donald Trump.

A military band entertained crowds at the opening ceremony, which saw the French flag raised on an ice replica of the famous Arc de Triomphe monument in Paris.

Other highlights included an ice moulding of singer Pikotaro, who rose to fame when his song”Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen” went viral on YouTube last year. That song also inspired an ice sculpture of President Trump holding an apple and a pen, a reference to the main dance move in the music video.

In addition, there were sculptures from Nintendo’s Pokemon Go game and Star Wars characters, including the villain Darth Vader and robots R2D2 and C-3PO.

Teams from around the world will compete in a snow sculpture contest that forms part of the festival, with the winner being chosen on Thursday.

The Sapporo Snow Festival, marking its 68th edition this year, ends on Sunday.

MANILA – The Philippines held a memorial on Monday for a South Korean businessman whose kidnapping and murder by rogue anti-narcotics police prompted a shock suspension of police from President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.

Diplomats, government officials and members of the South Korean community were joined by more than 100 uniformed police at the ceremony to mark the death of Jee Ick-joo, which caused the biggest scandal of Duterte’s seven-month-old presidency.

Read also: Philippines puts anti-drug operation on hold to tackle rogue police

Mourners in black stood before a portrait of Jee placed on a stage covered in white flowers at a Christian service for a man whose death led to a Duterte taking police off the front lines of his anti-drugs campaign, his administration’s signature policy.

Duterte is forging ahead with a crackdown in which 7,600 people have been killed, a third in police operations, police have said. Reported killings have shrank dramatically in the week since the suspension.

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency is now in charge and will form a joint task force with the military, which will reinforce drugs operations against armed elements, the agency’s director said on Monday.

South Korea plays an important role in the Philippines as an investor, aid donor, provider of military hardware and source of a quarter of the country’s tourists.

The ceremony was held at the Camp Crame headquarters of the Philippine National Police (PNP) where Jee was killed in October by members of an anti-drugs unit.

He had been arrested for drug offences that his wife and lawyers said was an official cover for kidnap for ransom.

Read also: Wife of slain Hanjin exec: What did we do to deserve this?

Charlie Shin of the United Korean Community Association of the Philippines delivered a speech at the memorial and later said the authorities had gone to great lengths to show their remorse for Jee’s death.

“We are holding the memorial service inside the camp. They opened it, they don’t hide anything, to show they are sincere to the Korean community so we appreciate it,” he said.

“Hopefully, the Korean community will trust the PNP more than before.”

YANGON – A Buddhist monk in Myanmar has been caught hiding more than four million methamphetamine pills in his monastery, police said on Monday, following a record haul of stimulant seizures last year.

The monk, named Arsara, is in custody after police discovered hundreds of thousands of the tablets in his car as he was driving from Shwe Baho village in the town of Maungdaw in Rakhine state bordering Bangladesh.

“First the police found 400,000 drug pills” when they searched his vehicle on Sunday evening, local police chief Kyaw Mya Win told AFP.

“The police then went to the monk’s monastery and found another 4.2 million pills.” Myanmar is one of the world’s top narcotics-producing nations, churning out huge quantities of methamphetamines as well as opium and cannabis.

The meth pills are are hugely popular across Asia among everyone from wealthy clubbers to exhausted blue-collar employees working long shifts.

Last year police confiscated a record 98 million stimulant tablets, nearly double the 50 million seized in 2015.

Drug prosecutions also jumped around 50 per cent from 2015 to 13,500, which police said reflected the growth in the local drug trade.

Trafficking has particularly been on the rise in Rakhine state, home to more than a million people from the impoverished Muslim Rohingya minority.

In September state media reported that two men had been arrested after 6.2 million methamphetamine tablets were found in their car in Maungdaw.

DENPASAR, Indonesia – Prosecutors in Indonesia are examining online video comments by a US woman jailed for 10 years over the 2014 murder of her mother on the resort island of Bali to decide if they justify a stiffer sentence, authorities said on Monday.

Heather Mack, originally from Chicago, was tried and convicted alongside then-boyfriend Tommy Schaefer in the murder of her mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase in a taxi outside a luxury hotel.

In the video uploaded to YouTube on Feb. 2, Mack speaks to the camera, saying she initially asked Schaefer to find someone to kill her mother, but he refused.

“I don’t regret killing my mother … but I regret bringing Tommy into it. Tommy is an innocent man,” she says.

It was unclear when or where the video was recorded.

A lawyer for Mack said she had been pressured into making the confession video.

“We suspect Tommy’s motivation is to attack Heather after they broke up,” the lawyer, Ben Seran, told Reuters.

Schaefer’s lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

Prosecutors were studying the video, said Ashari Kurniawan, a public relations official in the Bali prosecutor’s office. “If Mack is indeed the mastermind of the murder, the video can be used as evidence in the case, and the sentence should be heavier than it is now,” he said.

Mack and her mother, who had a troubled relationship, had travelled together to Bali in August 2014, and were staying at a luxury hotel, the St. Regis Bali resort. Schaefer joined them, surprising von Wiese-Mack, who did not know he was coming to Indonesia.

Schaefer, who said in court he had killed von Wiese-Mack in self-defence, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for premeditated murder.

Mack was convicted of being an being an accessory to murder. She is serving her term in a Bali prison where she gave birth to a daughter just before being sentenced.

In the three-part video, Mack says although Schaefer is innocent, he had helped hide her mother’s body in the suitcase. “I don’t want to live in a lie anymore. I made it up in my heart … that I wanted to kill my mother,” she says, adding that she believed her mother had killed her father several years earlier.